Topic: Leap Software ComplianceSubscribe | Previous | Next
Jessica Daaboul 1/2/2019
Hi,
In terms of compliance of this software with ISO standards or other modelling software standards and computer software modelling methods. Can you please indicate what compliance standards are used for the development of LEAP? or what are the quality assurance indicators used for developing and maintaining the software modelling processes.
Regards
Jessica
Charlie Heaps 1/3/2019
>>In terms of compliance of this software with ISO standards or other modelling software standards and computer software modelling methods. Can you please indicate what compliance standards are used for the development of LEAP? or what are the quality assurance indicators used for developing and maintaining the software modelling processes.
Hello Jessica,
Thanks for your question. Currently LEAP is developed by a very small team at SEI - a not for profit environmental research organization, and we do not yet have the capacity to formally follow ISO standards for software development. However, we do try and follow good practices for the software development process wherever possible. In particular, we make use of practices such as unit testing, functional testing, coverage testing, and regression testing. LEAP is developed in Delphi an integrated development environment that includes numerous features for helping to manage some of these tests. We also make use of a tool called AQTime that provides tools for performance and coverage profiling. In 2019, we are looking to improve our software QA processes further, for example by investing in new tools to help automate and better manage our testing processes.
We also do alpha and beta testing before any public releases of LEAP. The alpha testing involves having our in-house researchers test out the software, while the beta testing involves a select group of volunteer testers. LEAP also has a built-in crash and bug-reporting system which connects to FogBugz (Manuscript): a web-based project management system for bug and issue tracking. We use this system to help monitor and prioritize bug fixes and other issues as they arise, and we have found it to be very effective in helping make LEAP more robust in recent years.
Finally, I should note that LEAP has a very active community of users who, through this support forum, help us to maintain the quality of the tool. As you can see from the What's New page, we try to respond quickly to issues and we are continuously improving the tool. We are currently working on a new release of LEAP (LEAP2019) that, among other areas, further focuses on reliability and performance. This version is expected to be released in the Spring of 2019.
While realizing that our approach is not comparable to one at a large professional software company, I hope the above is at least sufficient to give you a reasonable idea of our current and planned future practices.
Best wishes,
Charlie Heaps
LEAP developer